Rejoice: Kalabox 2.0 Released

Proudly announcing the release of Kalabox 2.0, our open-source Docker-powered local development tool that provides the fastest way to develop WordPress and Drupal applications.

Today we released Kalabox 2.0. If you're not familiar with Kalabox, welcome! Kalabox is an open source project created by Tandem to provide WordPress and Drupal developers the fastest way to develop, test, and deploy websites while working on their own computers.

Solving the Problem of Local Development

We created Kalabox to solve one of our biggest painpoints: onboarding developers into new projects. We noticed it could take hours for developers to get setup working on a site, and further hours whenever they needed to update or debug their local development environment. After hearing "it works on my machine" and helping people debug their MAMP installations or custom Vagrant environments one too many times, we decided enough was enough.

To eliminate onboarding woes, Kalabox provides all the tools necessary to build a WordPress or Drupal site within a virtualized Docker environment. Kalabox provides a powerful set of tools to both advanced and beginner programmers alike. Unlike many developer tools, it comes in an easy-to-use installation package and is available on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Working with the Pantheon Hosting Platform

One of Kalabox’s key features is tight integration with the Pantheon website management platform, which provides PaaS hosting for WordPress and Drupal. Kalabox users can connect their Pantheon account and then retrieve any of their Pantheon-hosted sites for development on Kalabox. Kalabox users have said this can cut onboarding time from hours to minutes.

Kalabox is Ready for General Adoption

The product of nearly 2 years in development, the 2.0 release signifies that Kalabox is ready for general use by developers. We're extremely grateful for our large group of early adopters. Their bug reports and encouragement helped fuel us, even when tackling very difficult problems like virtual environment filesharing, maintaining compatibility across multiple operating systems, and chasing the Docker development cycle as that technology rapidly matured.

We believe Kalabox is a great way for development agencies and freelancers to start standardizing their workflows and solve a basic problem of web development.

The Future

Kalabox isn’t done yet. Plans are being made to add more frameworks (Laravel and Symfony are top contenders) and create plugins to help developers use advanced tools for analyzing website performance, debugging, and testing. Because of the flexibility of Docker, there are many different ways Kalabox can help developers. We're particularly excited to see other developers start extending Kalabox even as we continue our development efforts.